Florida's rules don't protect interests of students, taxpayers

A memorable exchange took place in February 2011 between two powerful Florida senators during a committee debate on Senate Bill 736, which ushered inFlorida's new teacher-evaluation system.

Nan Rich, a Sunrise Democrat, suggested it might be more prudent to wait for the results of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded pilot program to develop effective teachers in Hillsborough County public schools before surging blindly forward with something so broad and untested.

Steve Wise, a Jacksonville Republican, and the bill's sponsor, brushed aside her suggestion, insisting that if his bill weren't passed, "children would be irreparably harmed."

Wise's hyperbole aside, let's agree that he is genuinely concerned aboutFlorida'schildren. Let's furthermore assume he applies the same standard to all legislative education policy. His SB 736 is still a work in progress and a leap of faith. Half relies on tricky massaging of test data and the other half on a teacher observation system that hadn't even been completed at the time. Similar unknown unknowns are at work inFlorida'scharter-school policies — all of which Wise voted for.

One of the operative words in education reform today is "accountability" and for the most part, the charter-school industry has embraced the notion. But toFlorida'scharter-school cheerleaders, accountability is limited to test scores, and current Florida charter-school policies irresponsibly leave the charter-school choice a far less safe option for children, families and taxpayers.

Local boards have limited recourse even when blatant examples of unethical behavior by charter operators occur. Even a Miami charter school that held adult parties after hours, and the Pinellas school that was imposing Scientology on its captive students, were allowed to stay open. Talk about irreparable harm.

Had these breaches occurred in public schools, school board action would have been swift and relief to the affected students and families would have been immediate.

After learning that an Orange County charter school would be tripling its taxpayer-funded management fees, Sen. David Simmons, a Maitland Republican, proposed corrective legislation. Simmons said, "I don't want a situation where our management companies for the charters are taking excessive amounts for the fees."

Such enormous fees are nothing new for Florida's charter schools. Academica collected $9 million in management fees last year just in its South Florida schools. A Miami Herald story last month reported that some Florida charters are currently engaged in double-dipping into federal funds by establishing two schools in the same building. These examples indicate that current policies aren't providing accountability to taxpayers.

In February, Florida police officer Robert Ascencio, now president of the Florida Public Employees Partnership, penned a disturbing overview of investigations into Florida charter schools. The investigation Ascencio was part of found "owners of the management companies were either the same as the school founders or were directly connected to them." And that "all of [these] revealed major conflicts of interests in most of the decisions made on the spending of tax dollars and education of students."

Worst of all, his investigation found that the "majority of these schools were found to be ill-equipped with teaching materials that often were substandard to those in public schools."

Florida's lawmakers and policymakers excessively favor charter schools in a manner that does not rise to Wise's irreparable-harm standard. While charter-school lobbyists bemoan the singling out of a few bad apples, it's clear that the current measures aren't protecting the interests of Florida's children, families and taxpayers. For the state's charter schools, accountability has been defined downward.